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The team at PAPER estimated their article (NSFW) containing pictures of a very naked Kim Kardashian would quickly receive over 100 million page views. The very definition of bursty viral driven traffic.
As a comparison in 2013 it was estimated Google processed over 500 million searches a day. So a nude Kim Kardashian is worth one-fifth of a Google. Strangely, I can believe it.
How did they handle this traffic gold mine? A complete recounting of the unusual behind the scenes story is told by Paul Ford in How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian (SFW). (BTW, only one butt pun was made intentionally in this story, all others are serendipity).
What can we learn from the experience? I know what you are thinking. This is just a single static page with a few static pictures. It’s not a complex problem like search or a social network. Shouldn’t any decent CDN be enough to handle that? And you would be correct, but that’s not the whole of the story:
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